Programming WCF Services

Asynchronous Calls

When a client calls a service, usually the client is blocked while the service executes the call, and control returns to the client only when the operation completes its execution and returns. However, there are quite a few cases in which you want to call operations asynchronously; that is, you want control to return immediately to the client while the service executes the operation in the background, and then somehow let the client know that the method has completed execution and provides the client with the results of the invocation. Such an execution mode is called asynchronous operation invocation, and the action is known as an asynchronous call. Asynchronous calls allow you to improve client responsiveness and availability.

Tip

One-way operations are inadequate for asynchronous calls. First, one-way calls are not guaranteed to be asynchronous at all. If the service’s incoming calls queue is filled to capacity, WCF will block the caller of a one-way call until it can place the call in the queue. In addition, there is no easy way to notify the client regarding the results or errors of the call when a one-way operation completes. While you could hand-craft a custom mechanism that passes method IDs to every one-way call and then uses a callback to report completion, results, and errors back to the client, such a solution would be cumbersome and proprietary. It would require the service to always catch all exceptions, while communication errors may not reach the ...